“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant," he said. "In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.”

The move might suit Google just fine as a switch to mobile devices would mean more reliance on cloud storage and computing.

Google has already shown how much the world relies on its products like Gmail. Last fall when the email service went down, Twitter dealt with the repercussions as angry Google users flooded the San Francisco-based social networking site to complain about their down email.